George Bates tackles his new job as head football coach at Minor with gusto

Former Parker coach George Bates, captured here on the sidelines in the Game of the Week against McAdory, tackled his new job as the athletics director and head coach at Minor with gusto late last week after getting approved by the Jefferson County Board of Education. (Mark Almond / malmond@al.com)

He likes to play with pace and has set a first-year goal to make the playoffs.

"Our goal is to make the playoffs this year in our first year there," he said. "That's what we want."

The new leader of the Tenacious Tigers quickly met with his old program on Thursday afternoon after news of his job change moved quickly. He then met with two different elements on the Minor football program the very next day.

He met with 150 eighth-graders at Bottenfield Middle School and expressed that they are future of the program.

"The first thing I want to do at Minor is to make sure that Minor kids and the kids that grow up in this community play their football at Minor," Bates said. "We want to keep the Minor kids at Minor. ... There are kids that you look around at different schools on different rosters and those are Minor guys. We'll work to put a stop to that."

He favors the spread on offense and the 4-3 on defense. He'll stress creative special teams and aggressive football.

"We'll want to be aggressive and to make it fun," Bates said. "Football is supposed to be fun for these kids, too. We'll make it fun."

He said it was tough telling his former players at Parker that it was something that made the most sense for his coaching career.

"I wanted to stress that to them that I wasn't the Parker football program and that they were," Bates said. "The guys on the team are Parker football. They can still succeed and will still succeed with whomever the administration decides to bring in after me. That guy won't be Parker football. They will still be the reason why the program does well."

The opportunity to be the coach at Minor was a bigger school in the Jefferson County school system. He was also hired as both the athletic director and head football coach at Minor. The AD role was something he didn't get a chance to do at Parker.

"I told them the reason I had to leave was because it was a promotion and it was an opportunity at my age and at this point in my career that I had to take," he said.

Bates, 33, said the players were initially shocked by it, but the veteran players in the program eventually approached him and said they understood why.

"I think initially they think it was something that they had done that made me want to leave," Bates said. "The older guys were able to look at it as not 'Why are you leaving us?' but they understand it was something that I just could not pass up."

He sees the ability to line up true feeder schools in the community to pump players into one high school as a great tool for program building in the future.

"There are four or five elementary schools and one middle school that feeds right into the high school," he said. "To me, that boiled down to that one big community and one high school and that feeder pattern. Everybody is going to be a Minor Tiger. That alone with that athletic director spot was what really pushed me over the hump to go for this job. Its a true farm system and that's so intriguing."

Bates said it is not certain what he will teach at Minor and if he'll be able to bring any coaches with him from Parker.

He's only seen one game film of Minor from last season and is excited by the potential he sees in his new program.

"You can see that we have some explosive athletes in the program, but we've also got to have more than just speed and skill guys," he said. "We've got some size, too. We've got to develop those guys in the trenches that win football games, too."

Minor will have approximately 14 starters back next season, but Bates is smart to not put too much stock into that.

"I look at it as eight returning guys on offense with varsity playing experience," he said. "Those eight starters in that old system might not be starters in my system. Some of those guys might be starting on defense in my program. The way you have to look at it is guys who have a lot of playing time instead of guys that you can already pencil in as starters."

Minor went 4-6 in each of the last two seasons. Bates went 12-10 in two seasons at Parker, including an 8-4 season last fall. He led Parker to its first playoff win since 2005 and its first road playoff victory since 1998.

"I believe we will have everything in place at Minor to build it into a true power," he said.